[Reallynow]

A few points:

This is not just getting high. The antidepressant effects far outlast the brief trippy effects, which is an important reason why science is interested.

Although this is a small sample, this is not the first study of this antidepressant effect, which had been studied since at least 2000 (citation at end). I'd guess this study is probably getting extra attention from the BBC because of it's from a British group of researchers.

This area of research is important both because it's a new mechanism of antidepressant (opening doors to other drugs and a better understanding of depression) and it is faster acting than other antidepressants, which improve mood slowly over weeks. For the suicidal, this wait can be a lifetime.

There's currently a super interesting (to some of us) question about how important the acute trippy effects are to the sustained antidepressant effects. Is this something where we can engineer out the psychedelic components or are these somehow part of the antidepressant mechanism? See for example this paywalled paper from Zatare's group, which correlates what they call 'dissociative' effects with the antidepressant effect http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032714...

(An early paper on the phenomenon is Berman RM, et al. Antidepressant effects of ketamine in depressed patients. Biol Psychiatry. 2000;47(4):351–354. Paywalled http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-322... )